The Slavery Reader brings together the most recent and essential writings on slavery. The focus is on Atlantic slavery ? the enforced movement of millions of Africans from their homelands into the Americas, and the complex historical story of slavery in the Americas. Spanning almost five centuries ? the late fifteenth until the mid-nineteenth ? the articles trace the range and impact of slavery on the modern Western world.

Key themes include:

• the origins and development of American slavery
• work
• family, gender and community
• slave culture
• slave economy
• resistance
• race and social structure
• Africans in the Atlantic world.

Together with the editors' clear and authoritative commentary and a substantial introduction, this volume will become central to the study of slavery.